Peer review debate in London

There was a fun debate on peer review and its future at the City University, London yesterday. As usual at such events, most of the speakers were from the publishing industry, representing Nature, Elsevier, BMJ, and BMC. This illustrates how we are still largely looking to professionals from the industry to lead us into the future of scientific publishing — despite the fact that web technology gives us all the tools we need to ditch the lame game of secret peer review and define new rules, a better game, for science.

Although most of the speakers were from the industry, Sylvia Tippmann and the other organisers from the Science Journalism programme at City University, London invited two scientists, Peter Ayton and myself.